Looking at Clova’s paintings is an immersive experience. Her choice of motif, often a fusion of interior and still life; mirrors her love of travel and the exotic but also the eclectic juxtapositions of instruments, vintage textiles and furniture in the house that she shares with her musical family.
Artefacts brought back from Turkey, China and Morocco inspire large assemblages in the studio and provide the starting point for rich and absorbing paintings. The interaction of exuberant colour harmonies, sensuous shapes and dancing patterns, draw one into the carefully balanced but often bold compositions. The surfaces and textures of the arrangements are brought alive by a painterly handling, stylistically somewhere between Impressionist and Post-Impressionist.
Always working from life, her commitment to drawing and intense scrutiny of her subject can be traced back to a rigorous training at The Ruskin and the Royal Academy Schools and, in particular, to the teaching of Jane Dowling and Peter Greenham.
The paintings are in oil, gouache and the seductive but rarely used medium of distemper - a combination of warm organic glue and pigment. An unexpected Covid-related perk has been regularly seeing one of my distemper canvases, painted fifteen years ago, on the BBC news! Whenever they interview their favourite public health expert, the picture she commissioned from me is just behind her head. So many people have recognised it and got in touch.
TRAINING:
1978 - 81 Somerville College
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford
M.A. Fine Art
1981 - 84 Royal Academy Schools, London
Post-Graduate Diploma in Painting
AWARDS :
1980 Laurence Binyon History of Art Scholarship
1981 Fred Elwell Prize
1982 David Murray Landscape Scholarship
1982 Duff Greet Prize
1983 Landseer Scholarship
1984 David Murray Landscape Scholarship
1983 Richard Jack Prize
1984 Richard Ford Spanish Scholarship
COLLECTIONS : Christ Church, Oxford
Radley College, Oxford
Sir Brinsley Ford
Lord Windlesham
GALLERIES AND EXHIBITIONS:
Clova has shown extensively in London: Sue Rankin Gallery, Cadogan Contemporary, Burlington Fine Art, Darren Baker Gallery and regularly at the Mall Galleries (NEAC and RBA Annual Exhibitions) and in Oxford, where she has found many collectors. Shows in East Anglia, the Southern counties and Edinburgh have taken her work further afield in the UK. She has also found buyers overseas, notably in the U.S. and France, where she spends time each year.